4 ms·

The Japanese leadership believed (not without reason) that they could make the cost of invading Japan so incredibly catastrophic in American blood that the deca

The Japanese leadership believed (not without reason) that they could make the cost of invading Japan so incredibly catastrophic in American blood that the decadent, racially and culturally inferior United States would not pay it. People forget but the bloodiest days of WW2 where not in the insanely large battles where the Hitler regime was defeated, but rather in the last months when obvious defeat was years earlier for the Nazis - and where where Eastern Europe was devastated between the Germans the Soviets. The flow of blood was unimaginable. I personally would hope that would have been the case that the USA not invade, as the intelligence started to show that the two-stage Americans invasion plans for the Japanese home islands badly underestimated the Japanese. Washington was already concerned about the cost, but we know now that these estimates where off by almost 50%. They still had options, even without the Atomic bombs. That alternative would have been a starvation blockade. Given the complete collapse of the Japanese economy, the complete inability to import food, that blockade would have made what occurred in WWI with Britain blockading Germany, or the earlier famines in Bangladesh, or even the systematic starvation program that the Bolsheviks unleashed in the Ukraine (The Holodomor) look like Child's play. Edit - honestly curious why people are downvoting this?

vkou 5y ago
> The Japanese leadership believed (not without reason) that they could make the cost of invading Japan so incredibly catastrophic in American blood that the decadent, racially and culturally inferior United States would not pay it. They also forgot that right on the other side of a small channel was the world's largest army that was willing to pay it. The US has a total of 160,000 dead in the entirety of the Pacific war. That was a week of active fighting on the Eastern front. To their credit, they didn't actually forget, they were simply hoping that the USSR would keep it's word and not break their non-aggression pact. It didn't, though, and overran Japan's continental holdings in a matter of days. Losing Manchuria was huge in bringing Japan to the negotiating table.
- GartzenDeHaes 5y ago
  Not to mention that the USSR had already taken several of Japan's northern islands, which are still held by Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuril_Islands_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuril_Islands_dispute
- InTheArena 5y ago
  The Kwangtung army had been stripped to the bone, and then the Japanese has built up the army with underfed conscripts. They were faced with a army that didn't think a thing of spending lives or even being economical about the lives they spent, due to years of radicalization on the western front. That said, this point is usually very overblown by cold-war theorists. It was a factor, but not the Factor. The Atomic bomb was the critical factor in Hirohito's thinking and Kids in particular - and the imperial court is what forced the end of the war. Supposedly the Army was more concerned about the Russians, but the Army never cared about Japanese civilians anyways - and their concern went so far that leadership cliques in the Army tried to overthrow Hirohito.
panick21_ 5y ago
People might down vote because they are uninformed. Once you seriously look into Japan plans for suicide attacks on massive scales would have been very costly. They were doing series effort in transformed their air-force and navy into suicide attack armed forces. And these suicide attacks are not crazy, they were well plant and well executed attacks designed inflict massive costly attrition on the US. Think about literally 10000s of well planned and executed suicide plans and suicide submarines attacks, army willing to suffer mass sacrifice. And the fact is, the US did not have any solution for these suicide wave attacks. They were literally designed to work around US air defense patterns, and by the end of the war, the US had not figured out how to decisively defeated these attacks. Landing 100000s of troupes in Japan against massive waves of suicide plans would have been insane. > the systematic starvation program that the Bolsheviks unleashed in the Ukraine (The Holodomor) Just FYI, it was not a systematic starvation program, it was a systematic food export program. And it was not target at Ukraine, but was applied in much the same way all over the Soviet Union. I know there are some books that push the ethnic angle (and doing so is very popular particularly now), but its pretty clear from the top level documents and policies that it wasn't some form of ethnic warfare. It was do whatever you need to export food so you can buy machines from the West.
- myth_drannon 5y ago
  I think less of an export issue but mass collectivization all across USSR. My g-grandfather was sent to Siberia in 1932 for refusing to give up his cow to collective farm. That's one good farmer family less to produce. Now multiply it by one million and you get a famine on unimaginable scale.
  - panick21_ 5y ago
    Sure, the reason they did the collectivization beyond the ideology is so they could then control that production and channel it towards the uses they desired. Total production was expected to go down. The regime was very well aware of that. But their control over that production was increased exponentially. And considering the industrialization, a lot of that went into exports where it was exchanged for industrial goods. Sorry for your g-grandfather, must have been a horrible time. Its insane that back then they considered anybody a 'wealthy farmer' who had like 1-2 cows.

vkou 5y ago

> The Japanese leadership believed (not without reason) that they could make the cost of invading Japan so incredibly catastrophic in American blood that the decadent, racially and culturally inferior United States would not pay it. They also forgot that right on the other side of a small channel was the world's largest army that was willing to pay it. The US has a total of 160,000 dead in the entirety of the Pacific war. That was a week of active fighting on the Eastern front. To their credit, they didn't actually forget, they were simply hoping that the USSR would keep it's word and not break their non-aggression pact. It didn't, though, and overran Japan's continental holdings in a matter of days. Losing Manchuria was huge in bringing Japan to the negotiating table.

GartzenDeHaes 5y ago
Not to mention that the USSR had already taken several of Japan's northern islands, which are still held by Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuril_Islands_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuril_Islands_dispute
InTheArena 5y ago
The Kwangtung army had been stripped to the bone, and then the Japanese has built up the army with underfed conscripts. They were faced with a army that didn't think a thing of spending lives or even being economical about the lives they spent, due to years of radicalization on the western front. That said, this point is usually very overblown by cold-war theorists. It was a factor, but not the Factor. The Atomic bomb was the critical factor in Hirohito's thinking and Kids in particular - and the imperial court is what forced the end of the war. Supposedly the Army was more concerned about the Russians, but the Army never cared about Japanese civilians anyways - and their concern went so far that leadership cliques in the Army tried to overthrow Hirohito.

panick21_ 5y ago

People might down vote because they are uninformed. Once you seriously look into Japan plans for suicide attacks on massive scales would have been very costly. They were doing series effort in transformed their air-force and navy into suicide attack armed forces. And these suicide attacks are not crazy, they were well plant and well executed attacks designed inflict massive costly attrition on the US. Think about literally 10000s of well planned and executed suicide plans and suicide submarines attacks, army willing to suffer mass sacrifice. And the fact is, the US did not have any solution for these suicide wave attacks. They were literally designed to work around US air defense patterns, and by the end of the war, the US had not figured out how to decisively defeated these attacks. Landing 100000s of troupes in Japan against massive waves of suicide plans would have been insane. > the systematic starvation program that the Bolsheviks unleashed in the Ukraine (The Holodomor) Just FYI, it was not a systematic starvation program, it was a systematic food export program. And it was not target at Ukraine, but was applied in much the same way all over the Soviet Union. I know there are some books that push the ethnic angle (and doing so is very popular particularly now), but its pretty clear from the top level documents and policies that it wasn't some form of ethnic warfare. It was do whatever you need to export food so you can buy machines from the West.

myth_drannon 5y ago
I think less of an export issue but mass collectivization all across USSR. My g-grandfather was sent to Siberia in 1932 for refusing to give up his cow to collective farm. That's one good farmer family less to produce. Now multiply it by one million and you get a famine on unimaginable scale.
- panick21_ 5y ago
  Sure, the reason they did the collectivization beyond the ideology is so they could then control that production and channel it towards the uses they desired. Total production was expected to go down. The regime was very well aware of that. But their control over that production was increased exponentially. And considering the industrialization, a lot of that went into exports where it was exchanged for industrial goods. Sorry for your g-grandfather, must have been a horrible time. Its insane that back then they considered anybody a 'wealthy farmer' who had like 1-2 cows.